Development, Leadership, and Change: An Analysis of Education Peer Coaches\u27 Experiences

This qualitative case study examines experiences of teachers who left the classroom for a teacher leader role as a Peer Coach, a relatively new and mandated position with origins in United States educational reform movements. The responsibilities of this distinctive position include evaluating teacher performance, providing observation data and feedback, and coaching to improve instructional practices. Conversational-style interviews of ten Peer Coaches in a suburban Minnesota school district established an in-depth understanding of participants’ stories, and examination of data focused on the research categories of Development, Leadership, and Change. Analysis illuminated four emerging themes: Identity, Mindset, Behaviors, and Relationships. Results affirmed what is known about teacher leadership, and through application of established theory, findings indicated transformative learning for Peer Coaches. Influential leadership was evident, with opportunities to build authentic relationships and a culture of collaboration, mutual support, and trust. Shared leadership with administrators transpired through evaluating and supporting teachers, creating a strengthened community of practice within the schools and district. Participants experienced autonomy, increased professional network, opportunities for new learning, and a renewed sense of purpose. Grounded theory emerged and constructed unique understandings and insights of participant experiences. Discussion includes decision-making in education and growth flow of Peer Coaches, which shows increased levels of interactions and networks, allowing for broadened professional opportunities. Recommendations include expanding coaching in education with development of a coaching model to enhance teaching and coaching practices. Maximizing the transformative learning experienced by teacher leaders calls for a new approach to professional paths and advancement for teachers. The relevance of Peer Coaches’ experiences and perspective of teacher leaders provides insightful information with implications for authentic change in education

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination

Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration

Collaboration and teamwork: immersion and presence in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem-based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper describes, often in their own words, the experience of European occupational therapy students working together across national and cultural boundaries. Collaboration and teamwork were facilitated exclusively through an online environment, since the students never met each other physically during the OTIS pilot course. The aim of the paper is to explore the observations that here was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross-cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from the students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer-booked meetings and analysed using the qualitative constructs of ‘immersion’, ‘presence’ and ‘reflection in learning’. The findings indicate that ‘immersion’ was experienced only to a certain extent. However, both ‘presence’ and shared presence were found by the students, within their tutorial groups, to help collaboration and teamwork. Other evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. Further study is proposed to support group work in an online learning environment. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment.</p

Fulfilling Lives: Supporting people with multiple needs, Evaluation Report, Year 1

This report is prepared for the Big Lottery Fund (the Fund) by the national evaluationteam and provides emerging findings and lessons learned from the first year of thenational evaluation of the Fulfilling Lives: Supporting people with multiple needsinitiative hereafter referred to as Fulfilling Lives (multiple needs).The national evaluation has been designed to determine the degree to which the initiativeis successfully achieving its aims and how they are being achieved. The evaluation will beboth formative and summative in nature, in that, it will inform the ongoing design and delivery of Fulfilling Lives (multiple needs) and its component projects as well as assessoverall achievements and value for money to inform future decision and policy making.Within this context, the evaluation has a number of objectives:— To track and assess the achievements of the initiative and to estimate the extent to whichthese are attributable to the projects and interventions delivered.— To calculate the costs of the projects and the corresponding value of benefits to theexchequer and wider society. This will enable an assessment of value for money of theprogramme and for individual interventions.— To identify what interventions and approaches work well, for which people, families andcommunities and in which circumstances and contexts.— To assess the extent to which the Big Lottery Fund's principles are incorporated into projectdesign and delivery and to determine the degree to which these principles affect successfuldelivery and outcomes.— To explore project implementation, understand problems faced and to facilitate theidentification of solutions and lessons learned

Investing in Women for a Better World

Offers case studies of HERproject, a factory-based initiative working to improve women's health awareness, leadership skills, and employer relations by promoting the business value of workplace health programs and creating intervention networks

Placemaking for Cities : Pilot project on the transfer of good practice in community-led placemaking

This report provides an account of the main outcomes of Placemaking 4 Cities (P4C) project and offers critical evaluation of process as well as content of this pilot project in good practice transfer (GPT). In doing so this report draws together detailed descriptions and assessments of the transfer process from learning logs, the mid-term review and exit interviews with P4C participants. The learning logs and the mid-term review are attached in a separate appendix entitled ‘Supporting Documents’. The first part of the report is concerned with an analysis of the results that were achieved. It begins with a presentation of the good practices and anticipated outcomes defined in the baseline study and compares these to the actual results and outputs achieved. The good practices that were adopted and adapted through the transfer are presented at the end of this section. We then review the methodological approach that was adopted to facilitate the GPT, focusing in particular the preparation and executing of the peer review which was central to the transfer process. This is followed by an attempt to assess the impact of the P4C pilot for participating cities of the medium and longer term and the report concludes with a number of recommendations about the design and delivery of future GPT networks.Final Published versio

Reforming Public School Systems Through Sustained Union-Management Collaboration

Presents case studies of sustained collaboration between teachers' unions and management in school reform; common elements in initiating events, strategic priorities, supportive system infrastructure, and sustaining factors; and lessons learned

Building Capacity to Sustain Social Movements: Ten Lessons from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

Most funders agree that effective grantmaking requires pursuing a range of complementary approaches.Direct grants are the lifeblood of organizations and the cornerstone of funder practice, but grantmakers also provide critical value when they help grantees develop organizational leadership and governance, strengthen strategic collaborations with peers, network with new allies, and expand field knowledge, among other things.This report explores how grantmakers can leverage their investments by coupling direct grants with strategically delivered capacity building supports. It focuses on building capacity for community organizing and advocacy groups, though many of its lessons are more broadly applicable